"Real estate mogul Donald Trump has broadened his leadover his rivals
for the Republican presidential nomination, a new poll shows, as more
Republican voters begin to see the bombastic billionaire in a favorable
light.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R)
are tied for the next spot with six percent. Former Wisconsin Gov. Scott
Walker (R) claims 5 percent of the vote, barely ahead of Sens. Ted Cruz
(R-Texas) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) at 4 percent.

Ahead of next month’s second Republican debate, to be aired by CNN,
the poll finds former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina edging Ohio Gov.
John Kasich (R) for the 10th and final position on the debate stage.
Fiorina’s campaign has taken issue with CNN’s methodology, which would,
for the moment, leave her out of 10th place.

Though earlier polls have shown Trump building a broad coalition, a
slight gender gap is beginning to emerge. More male voters, 41 percent,
say they back Trump than female voters, 32 percent. Trump also gets a
disproportionate amount of support from those without a college
education, from Republicans in urban areasand from voters who say
national security is their most important issue.(See full crosstabs here)

Bush’s unfavorable rating among Republican voters, 36 percent, is higher than the 32 percent who say they see Trump unfavorably.

Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, former Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton appears to have arrested her summer slump.
Clinton leads the Democratic field with 52 percent of the vote, 29
points ahead of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)....

Only 29 percent of registered voters say the country is headed in the
right direction, while 71 percent say the country is headed off on the
wrong track. That’s higher than the 65 percent who said the country is
on the wrong track in a July Morning Consult survey.

The new Morning Consult survey polled 2,015 registered voters between
August 28-30, including subsamples of 769 Republicans and
Republican-leaning independents and 913 Democrats and Democratic-leaning
independents. The full sample carried a margin of error of plus or
minus 2 percent. The margin of error for the Republican sample is plus
or minus 3.5 percent, while the Democratic sample carried a margin of
error of plus or minus 3.2 percent." via Free Rep.Poll conducted via online interviews, Aug. 28-30, 2015. Image above from Morning Consult............................................

"This Iowa poll shows just how amazing Trump's rise has been....This is a Des Moines Register-Bloomberg Politics of
Iowa poll. The real story, according to Cillizza,is contained deep in
the poll. In May, when the Des Moines Register last polled, 27% of
likely Iowa Hawkeye Cauci goers viewed Trump favorably. Sixty-three
percent in the Des Moines Register poll regarded Trump unfavorably back
in May. His favorable number now is 61%. His unfavorable 35%.

This is almost an exact reversal, and they can't remember ever having
seen this before.Cillizza here at the Washington Post says, "Numbers
just don't reverse themselves like that in the space of a few months (or
ever). Especially when the politician in question is totally known by
the electorate." I'll tell you what. The theory...that
theestablishment and Republican Party has about how Trump's gonna fade
away is slowly but surely blowing up on them. Let me repeat that theory
for you.

The GOP establishment theoryis that Trump's name recognition is 99%
(so he's got no ground to gain) and his favorable-unfavorable is already
established, and you can't change that dramatically....Their theory was that...whatever his approval
numbers are have peaked....

They even admit in this poll they have never, ever seen this
before....You cannot
recover from that, except Trump has. Here's Cillizza: "In the almost 20
years -- gulp -- I have spent following politics closer than close,
I've never seen anything like the total reversal in how Trump is
perceived by Republican voters. It is, quite literally, unprecedented."
You know what else bugs 'em about it?...

They haven't had anything to do with it. Trump goes over their
heads. Trump reversing his favorables and unfavorables is totally on
Trump....If anything, the media has
been trashing and tarring and feathering and ripping him. That makes
it, as far as media people are concerned, even more earth-shattering.
That this guy, without their help, in fact, with them working against
him, has totally reversedin a matter of five months, what people think
of him....

And it's not just the media that are perplexed. The Republican wizards of smart who concocted this theory on how Trump
had peaked and it was just a matter of being patient and wait and he'll
blow himself up because he can't get anymore popular than whatever he is
now. That was their theory. He's too well known....There's no way he can change. And yet he has."...

The
real story is contained deeper in the poll. In May, when the Register
last polled, 27 percent of likely Iowa GOP caucus-goers viewed Trump
favorably while 63 percent regarded him unfavorably. In the new poll,
which was released Saturday night, Trump's favorable number is at 61
percent and his unfavorable at 35 percent. Um, WHAT?...Numbers
just don't reverse themselves like that in the space of a few months
(or ever). Especially when the politician in question is totally known
by the electorate. Once you are both totally known and broadly disliked —
as Trump was in May both in Iowa and everywhere else — you are doomed.
One hundred times out of one hundred.

All
the other candidates are grinding away in the single digits, in this
order: Ted Cruz and Scott Walker (both 8 percent), Jeb Bush and Marco
Rubio (both 6 percent), Carly Fiorina (5 percent), and Mike Huckabee and
Rand Paul (both 4 percent)."Wow,"
said Kedron Bardwell, a political science professor at Simpson College.
"This poll will have Republican consultants shaking heads in
bewilderment. Not since 1992 has anti-establishment sentiment been this
strong."

Bringing up the rear are Chris Christie, Bobby Jindal and
John Kasich (all with 2 percent); Rick Perry and Rick Santorum (both 1
percent); and Jim Gilmore, Lindsey Graham and George Pataki (all with
less than 1 percent)....

Candidates
who are political outsiders don't seem to be just a summer fling, as
some analysts had predicted, but a budding long-term relationship five
months out from the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses....

They're not
just mad at Democrats: Three-fourths are frustrated with Republicans in
Congress, with 54 percent unsatisfied and 21 percent mad as hell.

Electing
a nonpolitician is "becoming more important as I realize that the
Republicans in Washington are no different than the Democrats," said
retired engineer Craig Wiegel, 63, of Bettendorf, who participated in
the Iowa Poll in May. "They tell you one thing until they're voted in,
and then just go along with the Democrats."...

In
the last Iowa Poll, in May, Trump had the highest unfavorable rating of
all the Republicans, back when he was tied for ninth place with 4
percent. Trump has almost completely reversed his rating. Then, 27
percent had positive feelings about him and 63 percent negative. Now,
it's 61 percent positive, 35 percent negative.

"People asked if he
could right the ship of his upside-down favorable scores. The answer
is: Yes, hell yes," said J. Ann Selzer, the pollster for the
Register/Bloomberg Iowa Poll.

Poll respondents might not know many
specifics about Trump's positions, but they don't really care. The
majority of likely Republican caucusgoers say they're willing to put
trust in their top candidate to figure out the issues once in office (57
percent).

Like
Democrats in 2007 who looked for their savior in Barack Obama,
Republicans in 2015 seem to be looking for their savior in Trump.

Scott
Walker, governor of neighboring Wisconsin, led in two Iowa Polls
earlier this year, in January and May. In July, Trump came to Iowa to
ask Republicans to toss Walker off the first-place perch, and they
complied. "He's got that Type A personality to go out and get what
he wants and not back down," said Trump supporter Garrison Reekers, 43,
a deputy sheriff from Belle Plaine who considers himself a
business-oriented establishment Republican. "There's too much money in
politics, and Trump can afford to take care of himself, and then he
doesn't have to put on somebody else's agenda."

Large swaths of
likely caucusgoers from both parties share Reekers' frustration with the
amount of money in politics. Forty percent of Republicans are mad as
hell about it, and 61 percent of Democrats, their highest number in that
category.

"I
don't think he's dynamic enough at this point," said Christian
conservative respondent Julie Roe, 47, of Eldora, who works in ag
marketing.

Roe likes Huckabee and Cruz, and says she would never
caucus for Bush, because "all he wants to do is make government bigger"
and he has "no concept of how the real world lives" because he "has
never lived anything close to a middle class life."

She also said she detests political dynasties.

Bush
continues to struggle in Iowa. Only 45 percent of likely caucusgoers
have favorable feelings about him; 50 percent view him negatively. Bush
has yet to spend a dime on TV advertising here, but his super PAC
launches ads in September, hoping to use its financial advantage to tell
the story of Bush's conservative record to a larger audience.

Politics
watchers also might be surprised to see Huckabee and Fiorina so far
back. He's a previous winner of the Iowa caucuses, in 2008, and she's
hot on the national scene after a widely praised national debate
performance a month ago....

Ten percent of likely GOP caucusgoers are uncommitted or not sure of their first choice. Every
voter quoted in this article is keeping an open mind, expressing
willingness to swap to a different first-choice candidate....

Poll respondent Barbara
Olson, 63, of Burlington says Trump is now her first choice because of
what he has said about stopping illegal immigration and repealing
Obamacare, and because he's "a very good, savvy businessman.""..."About the poll"

Interviewers
with Quantel Research contacted 2,975 randomly selected active voters
from the Iowa secretary of state's voter registration list by telephone.
Responses were adjusted by age, sex and congressional district to
reflect all active voters in the voter registration list. Interviews
were administered in English.

Questions
based on the subsamples of 404 likely Democratic caucus attendees or
400 likely Republican caucus attendees each have a maximum margin of
error of plus or minus 4.9 percentage points. This means that if this
survey were repeated using the same questions and the same methodology,
19 times out of 20, the findings would not vary from the percentages
shown here by more than plus or minus 4.9 percentage points. Results
based on smaller samples of respondents — such as by gender or age —
have a larger margin of error."........................... ======================

ALEXANDRIA, Va.. "A new focus group commissioned by GOP pollster Frank
Luntz shows Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump is
virtually invulnerable to attack by rival 2016 candidates and the media,
leading Luntz to say that it is now "totally conceivable" that Trump
will become the Republican Party's nominee for president....

"This is a different cat," Luntz added. "It's not like Ross Perot in
1992, where people were simply unhappy with the two major parties;
they're choosing Trump affirmatively. Honestly, my legs are shaking
looking at these numbers. All those people who think he's going to implode are wrong. He's not going away."

Assembled in a room behind mirrored glassin an Alexandria, Va.
office building, 29 current and former Trump supporters held forth on
what they like and dislike about the controversial real estate tycoon,
who owns three New Jersey golf courses and once owned three Atlantic
City casinos.

Orion
Strategies today released the first results of a new, wide-ranging
statewide poll that measured voter attitudes toward next year's election
and significant national issues – including questions about Obamacare,
Planned Parenthood, the use of body cameras by police and the treaty
with Iran....

According to the complaint, “In this scheme, Defendants explicitly
promised donors that all money donated in response to Defendants’
solicitations would either be contributed by Defendants directly to the
Cuccinelli campaign or spent by Defendants as independent expenditures
in support of the Cuccinelli campaign.

In an exclusive interview, Cuccinelli tells Breitbart News he never
authorized Conservative Strike Force to use his name in the solicitation
of donations.

“They raised $430,000 [from July to November of 2013] … from many
email messages, 300 pages of which we got in discovery, in which they
were very explicit, including saying that all of your donations will go
for Ken Cuccinelli,” Cuccinelli tells Breitbart News.

Cuccinelli notes that the CSF ultimately donated $10,000 to the his
campaign, but “the only reason that $10,000 got to us...is that one
of their email solicitations was sent to one of our donors who
recognized the name of the defendant who signed the solicitation, that
donor then called up the defendant directly and asked that CSF
contribute to a fundraiser for my campaign.”

“After election day they sent an email out to their donor list,
saying CSF donated over $15,000 to Ken, did all these things for his
campaign, just preening for their donors. None of it was true,”
Cuccinelli says.

Initially, Cuccinelli tells Breitbart News, his team approached the
CSF and asked them to open their books. They refused to do so.

That’s when, in September 2014, the Cuccinelli campaign filed a
lawsuit against the CSF and key members of its management team, alleging
false advertising and violations of the Lanham Act, a federal statute,
as well as the Virginia False Advertising Statute.

“Defendants, however, have admitted that they did not use the money
raised invoking Ken Cuccinelli to actually aid the Cuccinelli campaign,
either through direct contributions to the campaign or through
independent expenditures in support of the campaign, other than a single
$10,000 contribution to the campaign on October 4, 2013—which amounted
to less than one-half of 1% of the approximately $2.2 millionthat
Defendants raised in 2013,”the complaint alleged.

“Instead,” the complaint continued, “Defendants used the balance of
the money so raised to enrich themselves. In short, Defendants’
political fundraising in 2013 invoking Ken Cuccinelli was not a means to
the legitimate end of supporting the Cuccinelli campaign, but rather
was an illegitimate end in itself, with the Virginia gubernatorial
election merely serving as ‘cover’ for Defendants to prey on
unsuspecting small donors across the country.”

In addition to CSF, “an unincorporated association operated and
controlled by Defendant Strategic Campaign Group,” according to the
complaint, Dennis Whitfield, chairman of CSF, and Scott Mackenzie,
treasurer of CSF, were named as individual defendants in the law suit.
Two additional individuals associated with CSF,Kelley Rogers and Chip
O’Neil, were also named as defendants.

According to its website,
CSF was created in 2009 by a small group of devoted conservatives who
wanted a way to effectively support candidates by motivating like-minded
voters at the grassroots level.

The chairman of CSF, Dennis Whitfield, has a respectable conservative
pedigree."...

[Ed. note: Not so-a
"respectable conservative pedigree" is by no means suggested by Whitfield's executive positions at Norquist's ACU, Bush's RNC, nor his tenure as a Reagan administration official. Reagan beat the Establishment to win the nomination but
immediately nullified his victory by naming George Bush his VP.] (continuing): "According to the website, “Mr. Whitfield served as the
executive vice-president of the American Conservative Union from
2008-2011. Before ACU, he served as the senior vice president for the
National Federation of Independent Business from 1998-2002. Prior to
NFIB, Mr. Whitfield was the former deputy secretary of labor under
President Ronald Reagan from 1985-1989.”

The website also states that “Conservative StrikeForce [CSF] is
advised on compliance matters by the leading authority on election law
matters, E. Mark Braden of the law firm of Baker Hostetler.”

Baker Hostetler is a high
powered Washington, D.C. based law firm co-founded in 1916 by Newton D.
Baker, who soon after the firm’s founding took a leave of absence to
become Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of War during World War I. Its
representation of CSF in the settlement agreement with the Cuccinelli
campaign was handled by Elizabeth A. Scully, a partner based in the
Washington, D.C. office.

With this settlement CSF is, in effect, out of business.Breitbart News attempted to reach Dennis Whitfield, chairman of CSF, for comment, but has not yet received a response." via Lucianne

Our Chairman is Dennis Whitfield. Prior to
joining Conservative StrikeForce, Mr. Whitfield served as the executive
vice-president of the American Conservative Union from 2008-2011. Before
ACU, he served as the senior vice president for the National Federation
of Independent Business from 1998-2002. Prior to NFIB, Mr. Whitfield
was the former deputy secretary of labor under President Ronald Reagan
from 1985-1989.

Conservative StrikeForce is advised on compliance
matters by the leading authority on election law matters, E. Mark
Braden of the law firm of Baker Hostetler.

Conservative StrikeForce exists to provide
assistance to conservative candidates across the country running
primarily in federal races. However, on occasion when federal and state
law allows Conservative StrikeForce does support candidates running in
state races such as Governor.

Conservative Strike Force relies on
the voluntary contributions of conservatives across America. The vast
majority of StrikeForce’s contributions average less than $50.00 and are
solicited through direct mail, the internet, telephones and our
website.

StrikeForce assists our endorsed candidates in
three ways. First, we make significant direct cash contributions to our
endorsed candidate’s general election fund in October of the election
year. Second, we make independent expenditures on behalf of our
endorsed candidates in the weeks prior to the general election. Third,
we encourage our supporters to get directly involved in our endorsed
campaigns by directly contributing or volunteering to help in some
grassroots capacity.

Conservative StrikeForce provides an
opportunity for conservative grassroots donors to collectively
contribute to an organization so their dollars can be combined and used
to benefit conservatives in campaigns of national concern."Image of CSF logo from its website.
======================

All
the other candidates are grinding away in the single digits, in this
order: Ted Cruz and Scott Walker (both 8 percent), Jeb Bush and Marco
Rubio (both 6 percent), Carly Fiorina (5 percent), and Mike Huckabee and
Rand Paul (both 4 percent)."Wow,"
said Kedron Bardwell, a political science professor at Simpson College.
"This poll will have Republican consultants shaking heads in
bewilderment. Not since 1992 has anti-establishment sentiment been this
strong."

Bringing up the rear are Chris Christie, Bobby Jindal and
John Kasich (all with 2 percent); Rick Perry and Rick Santorum (both 1
percent); and Jim Gilmore, Lindsey Graham and George Pataki (all with
less than 1 percent)....

Candidates
who are political outsiders don't seem to be just a summer fling, as
some analysts had predicted, but a budding long-term relationship five
months out from the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses....

They're not
just mad at Democrats: Three-fourths are frustrated with Republicans in
Congress, with 54 percent unsatisfied and 21 percent mad as hell.

Electing
a nonpolitician is "becoming more important as I realize that the
Republicans in Washington are no different than the Democrats," said
retired engineer Craig Wiegel, 63, of Bettendorf, who participated in
the Iowa Poll in May. "They tell you one thing until they're voted in,
and then just go along with the Democrats."...

In
the last Iowa Poll, in May, Trump had the highest unfavorable rating of
all the Republicans, back when he was tied for ninth place with 4
percent. Trump has almost completely reversed his rating. Then, 27
percent had positive feelings about him and 63 percent negative. Now,
it's 61 percent positive, 35 percent negative.

"People asked if he
could right the ship of his upside-down favorable scores. The answer
is: Yes, hell yes," said J. Ann Selzer, the pollster for the
Register/Bloomberg Iowa Poll.

Poll respondents might not know many
specifics about Trump's positions, but they don't really care. The
majority of likely Republican caucusgoers say they're willing to put
trust in their top candidate to figure out the issues once in office (57
percent).

Like
Democrats in 2007 who looked for their savior in Barack Obama,
Republicans in 2015 seem to be looking for their savior in Trump.

Scott
Walker, governor of neighboring Wisconsin, led in two Iowa Polls
earlier this year, in January and May. In July, Trump came to Iowa to
ask Republicans to toss Walker off the first-place perch, and they
complied. "He's got that Type A personality to go out and get what
he wants and not back down," said Trump supporter Garrison Reekers, 43,
a deputy sheriff from Belle Plaine who considers himself a
business-oriented establishment Republican. "There's too much money in
politics, and Trump can afford to take care of himself, and then he
doesn't have to put on somebody else's agenda."

Large swaths of
likely caucusgoers from both parties share Reekers' frustration with the
amount of money in politics. Forty percent of Republicans are mad as
hell about it, and 61 percent of Democrats, their highest number in that
category.

"I
don't think he's dynamic enough at this point," said Christian
conservative respondent Julie Roe, 47, of Eldora, who works in ag
marketing.

Roe likes Huckabee and Cruz, and says she would never
caucus for Bush, because "all he wants to do is make government bigger"
and he has "no concept of how the real world lives" because he "has
never lived anything close to a middle class life."

She also said she detests political dynasties.

Bush
continues to struggle in Iowa. Only 45 percent of likely caucusgoers
have favorable feelings about him; 50 percent view him negatively. Bush
has yet to spend a dime on TV advertising here, but his super PAC
launches ads in September, hoping to use its financial advantage to tell
the story of Bush's conservative record to a larger audience.

Politics
watchers also might be surprised to see Huckabee and Fiorina so far
back. He's a previous winner of the Iowa caucuses, in 2008, and she's
hot on the national scene after a widely praised national debate
performance a month ago....

Ten percent of likely GOP caucusgoers are uncommitted or not sure of their first choice. Every
voter quoted in this article is keeping an open mind, expressing
willingness to swap to a different first-choice candidate....

Poll respondent Barbara
Olson, 63, of Burlington says Trump is now her first choice because of
what he has said about stopping illegal immigration and repealing
Obamacare, and because he's "a very good, savvy businessman.""..."About the poll"

Interviewers
with Quantel Research contacted 2,975 randomly selected active voters
from the Iowa secretary of state's voter registration list by telephone.
Responses were adjusted by age, sex and congressional district to
reflect all active voters in the voter registration list. Interviews
were administered in English.

Questions
based on the subsamples of 404 likely Democratic caucus attendees or
400 likely Republican caucus attendees each have a maximum margin of
error of plus or minus 4.9 percentage points. This means that if this
survey were repeated using the same questions and the same methodology,
19 times out of 20, the findings would not vary from the percentages
shown here by more than plus or minus 4.9 percentage points. Results
based on smaller samples of respondents — such as by gender or age —
have a larger margin of error."

"It would seem to be the duty of every American pundit today
to explain the inexplicable and problematic rise of Donald Trump. The
critical question, however, is not the source of Trump’s popularitybut
rather the reason his popularity is so shocking to our political
culture. Perhaps Trump’s candidacy threatens a larger consensus that
governs our political and social life, and perhaps his popularity
signifies a profound challenge to elite opinion.

Why is Donald Trump so popular? Explanations range from
mere celebrity, to his adoption of extreme positions to capture the most
ideologically intense voters, to his explosive rhetoric. These
explanations are not entirely wrong, but neither are they entirely
right.

To begin with, his positions, as Josh Barro has written in the New York Times,
are rather moderate. As Barro points out, Trump is willing to
contemplate tax increases to achieve spending cuts. He supports some
exceptions to abortion bans and has gone so far as to defend funding
Planned Parenthood. He has called for protective tariffs, a position
heretical for Republicans, who are typically free traders. Although
opposed to Obamacare, he has asserted that single-payer health care
works in other countries. Even on the issue of immigration, despite his
frequently strident rhetoric, his positions are neither unique—securing
the border with some kind of wall is a fairly standard Republican plank
by now—nor especially rigid.

With respect to his rhetoric, whether one characterizes
his delivery as candid or rude, it is hard to ascribe his popularity to
colorful invective alone. Chris Christie, who never misses an
opportunity to harangue an opponent, languishes near the bottom of the
polls. Or ask Rick Santorum, as well as Mitt “47 percent” Romney,
whether outrageous comments offer an infallible way to win friends and
influence voters. Trump’s outré style, like his celebrity, helps him
gain attention but just as certainly fails to explain his frontrunner
status.

What Trump offers is permission to conceive of an American
interest as a national interest separate from the “international
community”and permission to wish to see that interest triumph. What
makes him popular on immigration is not how extreme his policies are,
but the emphasis he puts on the interests of Americans rather than
everyone else. His slogan is “Make America Great Again,” and he is not
ashamed of the fact that this means making it better than other places,
perhaps even at their expense.

(p. 2) Conservative pundits have complained for years about the
base and its desire for “ideological purity.” Trump shows thatwhat is
most in demand, however, is not ideological purity but patriotic zeal.
Only a fool would believe that the fate of the Export-Import Bank could
motivate millions of voters. It is not a minor and complicated organ of
trade promotion that motivates but whether the ruling elite is seen to
care more about actual national interests or campaign dollars and
textbook abstractions like free trade.

Trump’s critics misunderstand his political appeal just as
they fail to comprehend his business appeal. Indeed, Trump is almost
certainly not as rich as he claims he is, nor is his record as
glittering as others’, nor is his a rags-to-riches story....For Trump,
business is about winning and losing, and for real human beings, that’s
what gives it life....

Trump, however, is eros and thumos incarnate, and his very
candidacy represents the suggestion that these human qualities should
have a role in our political lifebeyond quivering sentimentalism. Trump
alone appears to understand that politics is more than policy and
ideology. Beneath the bluster, he offers an image of Machiavellian virtù long absent from American politics.

Nothing in our politics seems worthy of being taken seriously anymore. The White House takes to Twitter with Straight Outta Compton
memes about the Iran deal....This is precisely the precondition for Trump’s popularity, and his
unapologetic mockery of more conventional forms of political theater
makes him in some ways the most serious candidate in the race."

and opponents are not qualified to oppose. Regardless of these
demands' merits, such claims to authority are based strictly on the
proponents' credentials. My point, however, is that these credentials
are based largely on the government endowing these proponents with
positions and money. As President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned in his
farewell address, such expertise is a circular function of government
power..The event for which the decade is most likely to be
remembered, namely the "great recession," was a similar phenomenon. When
the financial bubble in mortgage-backed securities burst in 2008, the
leaders of both parties, and pundits from theNew York Times to the Wall Street Journal,
assured Congress authoritatively that appropriating some $800 billion
for the Treasury to buy up "toxic assets" would fix the problem.Three
out of four Americans dissented, in part because of widespread
recognition that the U.S. government's increase in expenditures from
$1.86 trillion in 2001 to $2.9 trillion in 2008, due in part to the war,
was unsustainable. Yet Congress bowed to "expert" opinion.But the
markets tanked, the fix did not work, and the economic collapse gathered
momentum. The subsequent Democratic administration increased spending
even more radically, to $3.7 trillion, roughly doubling federal expenses
in a decade, and pushed the national debt over $14 trillion—almost
equal to America's GDP. By 2011, 40 cents out of every federal dollar
spent had to be borrowed. .

"Although after the election of 2008 most Republican office
holders argued against the Troubled Asset Relief Program, against
the subsequent bailouts of the auto industry, against the several
“stimulus” bills and further summary expansions of government power
to benefit clients of government at the expense of ordinary
citizens,the American people had every reason to believe that many
Republican politicians were doing so simply by the logic of
partisan opposition. After all, Republicans had been happy enough
to approve of similar things under Republican administrations.
Differences between Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas are of degree, not
kind.

Moreover, 2009-10 establishment Republicans sought only to
modify the government’s agenda while showing eagerness to join the
Democrats in new grand schemes, if only they were allowed to. Sen.
Orrin Hatch continued dreaming of being Ted Kennedy, while Lindsey
Graham set aside what is true or false about “global warming” for
the sake of getting on the right side of history. No prominent
Republican challenged the ruling class’s continued claim of
superior insight, nor its denigration of the American people as
irritable children who must learn their place. The Republican Party
did not disparage the ruling class, because most of its officials
are or would like to be part of it."...

America's
ruling class lost the "War on Terror." During the decade that began on
September 11, 2001, the U.S. government's combat operations have
resulted in some 6,000 Americans killed and 30,000 crippled, caused
hundreds of thousands of foreign casualties, and spent—depending on
various estimates of direct and indirect costs—somewhere between 2 and 3
trillion dollars. But nothing our rulers did post-9/11 eliminated the
threat from terrorists or made the world significantly less dangerous.
Rather, ever-bigger government imposed unprecedented restrictions on the
American people and became the arbiter of prosperity for its cronies,
as well as the manager of permanent austerity for the rest. Although in
2001 many referred to the United States as "the world's only
superpower," ten years later the near-universal perception of America is
that of a nation declining, perhaps irreversibly. This decade convinced
a majority of Americans that the future would be worse than the past
and that there is nothing to be done about it. This is the "new normal."
How did this happen? - See more at:
http://www.claremont.org/index.php?act=crbArticle&id=319#.VeIfe5dLy